Stories blog

Heartbroken Universe is Chapter Four from my new novel, The Witch Next Door: A Story About Ghosts. Serializing the novel in development was inspired by a comment from my friend, fellow writer and Binghamton New York Native, Roger K. Miller. In spite of Roger's disclaimers, I am holding him fully responsible.

As caveats go, I want to point out, as I did before, that starting any novel is no guarantee of finishing it. Although I expect to complete the book, many orphans have littered my writing history. If you're new to this story or just want a refresh, you can start with Chapter One by clicking here.

HeartBroken Universe

Christmas Eve, snow began falling late in the afternoon. Still coming down hard, it settled the village below us in a pinkish haze, a fog-shrouded pond with fuzzy streetlights struggling to pierce through. There was probably a foot on the ground by now. Val spread her long coat to help keep my ass dry. The one I’d wrapped myself in for the trip to Endicott wasn’t long enough to sit outside and watch the snow, which we decided to do almost as soon as I got to her house. We sat in a vacant corner lot on the hill a couple of blocks away. Heavy wet flakes forced a misty silence. Our heads were topped with white. “I guess I should’ve worn a hat.” “I don’t remember ever seeing you with a hat,” Val said. “Baseball.” She nodded in the dark. “It’s really beautiful,” she said, drawing her hood closer to her face. Strands of wavy hair leaked out around the contours of her cheeks and alongside her neck. Streets congesting with snow, edges rounded or eliminated like romantic poetry, Endicott looked as soft and gentle as the snow showering it, comfortably make-believe in the valley below us. “Like a dream,” she added. She looked at me with a smile. “I’m glad you came out to see me.” “I might be crazy, hitchhiking all the way out here in this weather.” With very light traffic, I’d been lucky to make it across the cities fast. I might need to spend the night walking all the way home. I still hadn’t braked myself with a practice for planning much in advance. Life would happen, and I’d grab the experiences as they slid by. “Maybe I’ll freeze to death before I get home again,” I added, “but I wanted to see you. What else was I going to do, sit home and wait for Santa Claus? Nothing, absolutely nothing was going on.” On impulse, talking with Val on the phone, I decided to ignore the storm for a chance to see her. She was willing and there was time. No wasting that. “Do you still believe in Santa Claus?” “I never stopped. What else have we got?” “Me, too.” The year gone by had been an emotional scrub brush altering my faith in the benevolent direction of the world around me. Eighteen years old felt like balancing on a pivot without any specific gravity or momentum in any direction, like my beliefs had been tightly racked and a cueball struck them, scattering them in a chaos so wild only a physicist could yank them back into order. “I think we need to figure it all out from scratch. I don’t even know where to begin.” “At the beginning, one step at a time, that’s the only way…” “No shortcuts, like ‘All you need is love,’ that kind of thing.” “Maybe, but how do we find them?” “I know I love you,” I said. “That’s always there.” “I love you too, but what can we do about it? Together, I mean.” “Are we too loose?” “When we’re together, we are, yeah,” Val agreed. “There’s no place for us to fit in. We have different lives in different places, and then, every once in a while, we have this.” She gestured at the snow softened cityscape below us, as if she created it. “I wish you’d let me change that.” The intensity of the snow, the cold air, the fluffed fantasy, dreaming in unison. “How? What are you going to do? Carry me off somewhere?” “I wish.” I was barely able to carry myself. “Maybe we should just stay like we are,” Val suggested. “You’re different for me. You make me look at myself in a different way. Maybe you keep me honest.” Her voice tapered into a laugh. “Maybe we’re just in-betweeners, Val. We meet in the seams between the rest of our lives.” “I’m not sure what that means,” she said. “I hope you’re not counting on me to explain it.”

“You always knew,” Val reminded me, “whether you wanted to or not.” “Really, I didn’t know what I knew. We were so different. I never heard of any couple like us. I didn’t know what was happening between us or what, if anything, I could do about it. You were just always there, the continuum, you know?” “Still.” “Still.” “That brings us to the point. You asked a question I think I can answer. You want a bigger picture. You want to understand how you got here, where you are right now, from way back where we were or before.” With an exaggerated gesture, she added a wisp of comedy to the mix. “Always, I do. I’m kind of of a mystery to myself. There are things I can’t explain.” “You could start with Ginny, but that won’t do anything but give you regrets. Why not go back to where your parents made you turn into a magician. That’s what happens if you want to survive after your parents kick you into the shadows before you’re old enough to tie your own shoes. You learned to lean on yourself, alone, self-reliant. Didn’t seem odd when Emerson grabbled you, even when he went way over your head? That’s been your style.” My brother brought me along to hang out at the university library when he went out to study on Saturdays. I always treated libraries the same way, like I was on a treasure hunt without much of a map, and I remember pulling Emerson’s essays off a shelf and getting scrambled trying to figure out his dense paragraphs. “I have a style, Val?” “Well, you left everybody, didn’t you — I mean, up to that point? To you, self-reliance meant independence. You took what you wanted out of Emerson, but that wasn’t what he meant. Emerson believed in community. You believed in staying out of it. When you tell your story, you make yourself look heroic, but let’s be honest. We’re friends. You weren’t. Sometimes, you were a painful person to know.”Got a pile of sins to pay for and I ain't got time to hide, Dylan wrote. Check. “For example…?” For Val, pictures were not hard to paint. “Let’s forget for a minute that you were so reckless with the girls’ feelings that you played around with Ginny’s cute little sister the one time she turned her back, but what did you do when the big moment came, when you had a chance to be strong for her? You loved her, no question, but you found it too easy to cut her loose, didn’t you?” In a sharply pitched moment, Ginny rushed across the room and leaned into my arms, tears streaming down her cheeks, afraid and crushed. “Take me with you,” she pleaded. “‘I can’t.’ That’s what you said,” Val reminded me. “I couldn’t take her with me. That was true. She was underage. I’d go to jail.” “Cover story,” Val waved me off. “You made that up for the book. You were underage, too. You didn’t really know about statutory rape. If you told the whole story, you’d talk about waiting at your apartment, hoping she’d make it there on her own, but you knew she wouldn’t, didn’t you? Of course. Besides, who but you and Ginny knew you had sex? Anyone?” I shrugged, not remembering for sure, embarrassingly confident that I probably told at least my best friend, Bruce, who’d already shipped out. “Her parents didn’t know,” Val insisted. “All they knew is you were sneaking around with their daughter, and they thought it was their job to protect her. But you didn’t stand up for her. You ran. If you stayed and confronted them, it might’ve made both your lives better in the long run. As you know, things didn’t go great for her once you left her, not for a long time.” “I can’t be responsible for what happened to her after we broke up.” “Really? Are you sure? Because if you’d figured out a way to stick with her and made it good, you’d sure take credit for that. Am I right?” “Well, we can’t undo the past, can we? But I paid for what I did, as you also know, in a way I never imagined.” My architecture fell apart pretty quickly without Ginny floating the joists. An emptiness washed over everything else. It lasted long enough, I wondered if it was going to be permanent. Fate finally lent a hand, one later winter day, sending a pair of rescuers named Doug and Boyd to pull me out. I’d been stunned. “I knew I loved her, but you don’t have to remind me I held something back. I always had one foot out the door, but it wasn’t until later that I realized my heart didn’t leave with me. My heart was still fused with hers. It’s a funny thing to say, and it was a discovery nothing I’d ever seen or heard prepared me for. Our hearts plug in, hard and deep, no matter what our boots do.” Val leaned away to pull me off the subject. What the hell? I can’t fix it now, anyway. “You remember when you learned to hold so much back, don’t you?” she asked. Was she pulling strings to surface memories or was it my own psyche? In my earliest memories of life as an escape artist, we were, all five of us, waiting like refugees on heavy wooden benches outside the office into which a social worker lead Mom and Dad. Two days on the train from Florida left us dirty, tired and smelly. Set aside Mom’s radical violation of visitation rights, our appearances alone might been enough all by themselves to stifle her claim to competent parenting. Mom was, as I saw it later, a child raising children. That’s why we loved her so much and also why she failed. The door with the frosted glass window opened. Mom ran out ahead of the others, a tissue pressed to her reddened face and, just like that, ran down the stairs without a word. All five of us turned to look at Dad and the social worker, now a temporary couple. The only detail I remember about her, besides her gender, was how explicitly she, not Dad, explained the realities ahead of us. Toward Dad, my feelings had improved from resentment when I saw him waiting on the railroad platform to indifferent. “You’re going to stay with your grandmother for a week or so until we can straighten things out with your parents.” Mom was gone, down the stairs. What was she going to straighten out? I noticed my brothers and my sister crying beside me. “I saw that, Val, and I remember thinking, I better cry too. So, I did.” “You faked it?” “I faked it.” “You see now? You were already out. You were already detached, at that age more like broken off, damaged goods, adapted for survival.” “I wish I knew how I got there…” “Does it really matter?” Val interrupted. “The thing is, if you really think about it, you stopped loving people, any people, right there, when your mother ran down the stairs, if not before.” “Holy shit.” “How did you miss that?” “I don’t know. I guess I must not have wanted to see it. Even knowing it now feels like shit.” “The thing you have to remember is that your loving people never really stopped. You just buried it. You loved your father, your mother, especially your older brothers you relied on for so long, your sister, of course, and others, but it was too risky. You buried it. Survival comes first.” “Those were some cold, fucking years…” “And what ended it? What happened?” “Ginny happened.” “By then, you were good at surviving, with a lot of help you didn’t know about, but your were a real klutz with love. You hadn’t exercised that muscle much. Your heart was a wreck.” “Wait a minute. What help I didn’t know about?”

Below is Chapter Three from my new novel in progress, A Witch Next Door: A Story About Ghosts. Now that I'd gotten this far, I am officially blaming my friend and fellow Binghamton native author, Roger K. Miller, for his casual suggestion about serializing books like Dickens did.

If you would like to start from Chapter One, which makes some sense, even with my rambling affairs called books, click here.

Conversation with Val

Ghosts are always around. You’re free to ignore them — at your own risk, of course. Most of your neighbors do. Usually, ghosts just watch you, hoping you make the best of things, figuring you probably won’t. Listening to them can jar you. Bullshit loses its wings where ghosts are concerned. The covers lift away when you edge that close; your stories go naked, their deceptions and dodges perilously like something out of Francis Bacon, not the philosopher, but the painter of raw, fleshy contours that make you want to look away. ********* Val told me how selfish I’d been simply and directly. I accepted it. She could get away with worse. I was happy to see her, to talk with her again. Once close, our paths diverged after walking together started feeling clumsy with all the different paces and cadences. For years, I’d kept things going by tugging her along. Then, I lost her. “Remember that Leonard Cohen song?” She asked. “Something like, ‘You who must leave everything that you cannot control. It begins with you family, but soon, it comes around to your soul…?’” She sang it, but she was flat. Sisters of Mercy — I got it in spite of her everyday tunelessness, a gift I just happened to share. People probably thought Val was too pretty or, at least, too refined for me. Her hard to tame hair, thick and dark brown, told a different story when she let it trail halfway down her back. She was just as crazy as I was, but for girls, risky meant riskier, unsafe and unprotected. “I remember it,” I said. “It was on the first Leonard Cohen album I owned. I played it about a million times. I bought it because I liked the lyrics from Suzanne so much. Then, all these other miracles showed up between the grooves. It was vinyl, before CDs or even tapes, scratchy as hell before I got rid of it.” “You didn’t get rid of it,” Val laughed. “You left it behind when you walked out on Maggie. You gave up all those albums because you thought it was worth it to get unstuck. No baggage is what you thought.” “I didn’t even have a record player, so I might as well…” “You already had the idea, anyway. You knew that song was written for you, not just you, but for you for sure. Cohen was shooting straight at escape artists, including himself — and you. You even ditched me, in your own dishonest way. Then, you went around telling everyone I was the love of your life. ‘Woe is me! I lost the love of my life!’ Really, I was the out story that made nobody else good enough. I was convenient perfection. Right?” “In my head, I thought you were, but I couldn’t make it work in the book. I couldn’t come up with a convincing way to carry it through. Too awkward, too forced, impossible to finish off. I finally just let it dissolve into the narrative. You know, it got lost. It’s one of those fancy tricks you have available when you write long stories. Readers forget. Like voters.” “How could I be the love of your life when we didn’t even have sex?” she challenged me. “We had sex.” “Oh, we had the act, that once. That was just you wanting to get it done with me, to get over the hump.” She laughed. “Excuse the pun. Anyway, what you did to me in that motel room was mental, not physical. It took you ten years to get there. If I’m the love of your life, how come it took so long to get laid?” “I’ve never really thought about it much. It was a long time, though.” “Especially for you.” “Yeah, especially for me.” “I was your best friend, for a while before that mistake anyway. I helped you get through, but then, you left me to go back to your wife. You were miserable with her. You cheated on her. You were a now and then father, but you left me to run back home before she got suspicious.” “You didn’t know that at the time.” “Of course not, you were Mr. Honesty. All your idealism… Who thought you’d lie like every other cheating husband? But you did lie to me, the love of your life, about it. You had about a year there where you lied to just about everyone, especially me. Some love of your life I was.” When she said it, it wasn’t as harsh as it reads. Enough time had passed, it was filtered with now-that-we-know-better humor. “You think about turning points as where your life changes and starts getting better,” I said. “That was a turning point, but it was straight downhill. A reverse snowball. My life got smaller. It took another tricky year to shake out.” “You should have stayed with me that morning. You’d have gotten through it quicker.” “Too much baggage, and really, I didn't have the balls to tell you how much I lied to you. I waited too long, and I didn’t see any way to make it work.” “That’s what I mean about you,” Val said. “It was easier for you to leave me than to, as you like to say, ‘stand tall.’ You’d already left your wife in so many ways, your son too, but Maggie’d take care of you. She’d take the blame for all the messes you made. You liked to think you were free, but really, you were just incompetent.” “That’s a little rough.” “…And a coward and an escape artist. What did you call it? Yeah — you were a skater, a human neutrino. You didn’t hook in like all those weak people do, and you hurt them. You thought it meant you were strong because you always held back enough save yourself from major damage. You have quite of list of injured, if you’d like reviewing it, starting with Joyce… Or Ginny, if prefer the more obvious…” She read something in my face. “It’s okay to talk this way now, isn’t it? I mean, the way we are…” “No reason to hold anything back,” I conceded. “You left me for Maggie, just for the record, but the opposite is true, too. You might still be married to her, if you didn’t have me.” I understood what she was talking about. Bookmarks, I’m convinced, start with something memory does. We leave bookmarks idling in the chemistry, suspended, ready for instant recall. One such bookmark got parked on the morning of the day I married Maggie. Conveniently arranged by fate, Carl — what ordinary people might call my best man — was so deep in a protracted hangover, he barely managed to open his door to let me in before crashing back into bed, leaving me to bounce around the rest of his apartment without interference. With no sounding board to remind me how unstable I was, it came to me that I was about to do a crazy thing. I was easing up to a full stop with my engine revving and a full tank of gas. Where was Carl, my wreck of an alter ego? Between his introvert/extrovert swings, he was an exacting gauge. He laughed at me when I took myself seriously and swung avuncular when I didn’t. Right now, he was facedown in his pillow, brown hair spread around his head like a spill. My objectivity awash with emotions, I could have used his reality check, objective intellect and lubricating humor, but he was still too drunk to properly do any of the best man things. I wasn’t convinced I could get him shaped up even in time for the wedding. So, I asked myself the question I should have asked before I twisted Maggie’s metaphorical arm to coax her to marry me. My laser beam of persuasion allowed nothing disempowering. Almost too late now, I asked.What about Val? If she showed up right now and wanted me to go with her instead, what would I do? It was a fucking dreadful question. What would I do? I’d go with Val, of course, letting my wedding blow up like a bag of feathers. But here was the kicker: if there was any way for her to make it more clear that she didn’t want me, God hadn’t thought it up yet. “I offered you perspective,” she reminded me now, “not a way out. You had a choice.” And I chose to get married but not completely. “You weren’t fair to Maggie. You always held something back, and then you blamed her for it…” “It was a two way street, Val. Come on now, it wasn’t all me…” “Doesn’t matter, does it? No matter what she did or didn’t do, you held out. What was the first thing you did, after you broke up with her, later on? I mean, the first time.” “I wrote you a long letter…” “…And you told me your believed we had ‘a continuum’ running through out lives. Where did you get that and how was she supposed to deal with that? Maggie didn’t even know. You and me? We hadn’t seen each other in years or even wrote or talked.” “Intuition,” I said, it was so obvious. “I just knew, but you threw a knife back at me.” Standing on the front porch beside mailboxes for all the apartments in our building, I read Val’s letter immediately, too eager to wait to read it indoors. It was a spring day, but cloudy, cool.I’m sharing my life with a man, she wrote furiously, then went on to tell me to take my continuum and go fuck myself, although not in those words. “Not my style,” she joked now. “That was one of the worst shots of my life. It knocked me out.” The next few days, I reconsidered, asking myself how I’d gotten it so wrong. The truth of it between us had seemed clear. Trust in my inner voice, in my strongest intuition, took a beating. I thought I had to reorient everything. I wobbled, began to steady, and… “Then, a few days later, I got your next letter. You turned around completely. ‘Yes, we have a continuum running through our lives.’ You agreed. Wow! Not for a second had I thought I’d get you back. I thought we were done forever.” “It’s important to be truthful. We had unfinished business.” She paused. “We had a good year after that, until you screwed everything up.” “Frankly, though, when you look at it, Val, you were maybe a little fucked up too.” She laughed harder than she had all day.

A Daily Show Firing Frenzy "I am calling to tell you," the voice on my cell phone said, "that I'm being fired and you're being fired." The caller was Georgia Pappas, line producer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Having wrapped up my morning appointment out in Lake Success on Long Island, I stood in the mild air beside my car to listen to my messages. Georgia's was the first.

Then, things got sillier.How I Got Hired Before I Got Fired To give you some background, this was the spring of 2006, the first year Jon Stewart hosted the Academy Awards. His workload was crushing, since he kept up his usual chores hosting The Daily Show while preparing for Hollywood. Further complicating things was Ben Karlin, a brilliant writer and executive producer, who was not handling the pressures as well as the seemingly always level Stewart and publicly referred to himself as "an asshole." I got involved because, as an account manager with The Daily Show as my highest profile customer, I was the point person for computer technology support. That situation deteriorated from difficult to disastrous that morning, while I eased my way out to Nassau County for a relatively calm meeting. Over the past week, strange things had occurred with the internet while Jon and his team were developing scripts for the awards show, bouncing them back and forth with producers in Hollywood. I waded knee-deep in this only because my high profile customer and one of television's brightest stars expected my our technicians to solve a problem that had them baffled. What happened was this. Every day, usually in the afternoon, the internet slowed to a crawl at The Daily Show. It might stay stuck that way for hours. It never happened before, and the timing now could not have been worse. For a number of reasons, The Daily Show and its young staff, almost all of them younger than Stewart, depended on the internet for news feeds, music and, honestly, diversion. When it dragged, inertia spread across the cubes like ice water. This morning, something worse happened. The internet went down completely, dead and silent.Karlin, who seemed to serve as the angry, aggressive side of the producing duo with Stewart, exploded, storming into Georgia's office, letting her know that she as well as the useless technology company (mine) she hired were on their way to oblivion if the internet did not buzz to life immediately. That's when Georgia left me the message. But before I retrieved it, other calls had stacked up, creating a stream of messages following hers.Can You Be A Grown Up For The Daily Show?

Looking back, even as it was a little at the time, it's funny that anyone believed I was the key to a solution. A Mac user in a universe run by PCs and their staunch advocates, I still hadn't figured out why you had to use the Start Menu to shut down a PC. The Wintel world seemed to rest largely on absurdities. But turn to me in a crisis they did. The most levelheaded conversation I had as I drove into the city was with my boss, Todd, a practical guy who had navigated plenty of technology crises of his own. He explained that our lead engineer wanted me on the scene because he thought that would calm things down. "What am I going to do, flip the internet switch back on?" "You might get it fixed faster than our guys have," Todd joked. "Seriously, though, can you get over there and see what you can do?" Then, I talked with our engineer on the scene, a man roughly ten times smarter than me who said, 'I think they need to see someone in a suit." He said that twice, for emphasis, which made it seem only slightly less crazy. I was wearing a suit, pinstripes, crisp shirt, neat tie and polished shoes. So, I filled what seemed a silly prescription. Really, my shoes weren't that polished, though. It was my lingering concession to my days in the counterculture. First, though, I had to go to another meeting set up by an inexperienced new account rep who asked me to come along for support. I stuck to that because it's my firm belief that when everybody else is panicking, the best thing you can to is decline to join the stampede. Except for Todd, everybody was panicking. I would be the calm in the eye of the storm. Maybe I would get credit for saving the Academy Awards. Probably not.

Not Our Fault, The Daily Show Is Wired Again Since our engineer was holed up in a windowless server room, our conversations were limited as I made my way to The Daily Show, early in the afternoon. After giving up their original space to Stephen Colbert's show, Jon Stewart's team relocated even deeper down on the West Side, taking over studios vacated by the Food Channel, just doors away from where the Central Park carriage horses were stabled. If you didn't know the address, you could hone in on the odor. Our engineer came outside to meet me when I arrived. He wanted to give me an update before I walked into the storm. He reassured me of the value of my showing up in a suit. No one, except Stewart and his anchors, ever wore a suit here, and the idea seemed to be that I might be perceived as a grownup. Illusions can help. But there was some good news. The internet was back up and running perfectly, releasing a lot of the tension. "What happened?" "Nothing to do with us. Time Warner decided to have an outage in the whole area for a few hours, this morning. They just didn't tell anybody." He explained this matter-of-factly. Anyone who has been a Time Warner Cable customer for even a few months in New York takes erratic service and indifference to customer needs as part of the deal, just as we did. But knowing where to point the finger of blame for that part of the disaster didn’t help lessen the aggravation brewing all week from inexplicable slowdowns. A credit to The Daily Show, they had been able to get their shows on the air without a hitch all week, but frustration was mounting. Ben Karlin's blowup was the best evidence.Being My Grownup Self In A Suit I poked my head into Georgia's office long enough to let her know that a grownup had arrived, and then, I went into the server room where I joined, not just one, but three engineers who were each ten times smarter than me. They were strangely relieved to see me. In case you've never been in a server room, they are a humming array of hardware and wires that are the foundation of the computer network, interrupted occasionally by a keyboard with a screen filled with symbols and code mere mortals have no hope of understanding. Some are large and orderly. Servers get hot and need airflow. More often, the server room was established in cramped space like it was at The Daily Show, treated like a necessary evil best neither seen nor heard. I wedged my six foot two inches in between racks of equipment and grabbed the only chair available. The engineers were at the pushing buttons stage. To be clear, when completely baffled or, better, awaiting a result from which you can get important information, engineers push buttons, creating the illusion of problem-solving labor for customers who are paying a lot of money for their brains and bodies. I first learned about this tactic when a baffling situation with one of my customers required sending in an expert, an expert button pusher, that is, an engineer with dubious technical skills but an abundant personality that melted suspicion. I remember him going at that keyboard and green screen. It was beautiful. He even talked about what he was doing as if it made sense. It's probably wrong to admire that kind of gift, but admire it I did. The reason our three engineers were pushing buttons and/or watching buttons being pushed was, unless the slowdown repeated, they had no way to trace its cause. They were trapped really. Without solving the problem, they couldn't leave, and until it resurfaced, they couldn't do anything else. While we waited our lead engineer speculated on a probable cause he could do nothing to confirm

Something To Do On A Sunny Afternoon Even after wrecking at least one firewall (installed to protect ingoing and outgoing internet traffic) that should have been sufficient, management at The Daily Show was unwilling to harness freewheeling use of the internet. The only restraint we had ever seen was when one senior staff member was asked to download his library of pornography on his own computer after it had filled up the storage on one server. Otherwise… These being the days of unlimited sharing on LimeWire, musical content for The Daily Show was often obtained from shared sources, and news was collected from the deluge of data beginning to swell internet content areas. Therein, our engineers guessed, lay the problem. Unlike most data that came across the internet, video came in a steady stream. It could not be broken down like normal data, and for that reason and because of its natural bulkiness, it clogged the pipes when it streamed. Given the timing of the slowdowns, late in the day, we speculated that someone was logging into a Daily Show video feed, from somebody’s desktop, when they got home from school or work and turned on their computer. LimeWire would instantly resume downloading or feeding whatever was incomplete from the previous session. Maybe somebody was feeding or downloading porn or pirating shows. It was impossible to know. Nobody admitted anything, but interestingly, when word got out that our engineers were watching, for the first time in a week or more, it did not happen again. As our expensive guys sat there, pushing buttons in a windowless room on a beautiful spring day, the internet hummed along like the gem it was supposed to be. To kill time, I sneaked off to the break room to snatch whatever junk food was around to compensate for another day without lunch. Walking out of the server room began to feel like entering heaven.

All's Well That Ends.... Well... Late in the afternoon, all three engineers and I met with Georgia in her office to explain what we thought happened and why we could not confirm it. After an exhausting day, not really satisfied, Georgia was happy enough to still have her job and the pressure off. She looked exhausted, as did her assistant, Pam, who had been working under the same gun. For whatever reason, the internet problem never surfaced again, and we were soon back to normal. Jon Stewart went on to host the Academy Awards to mixed reviews. His stature on TV continued to rise, and for a few more years, I was able to brag about my role, trivial though it was, in his and Stephen Colbert’s success. Nobody besides my wife and our much smarter than me engineers had to know how trivial it was. I was the grown up in a suit. Georgia Pappas and Ben Karlin were not so lucky. Within a year, both were gone, but even in their absence, both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report got better and grew into solid resources for entertainment and, amusingly, news on cable TV and the internet.Conclusion The crazy demands of daily TV production can warp reality. In this situation, I didn't mind getting caught up in it all.What's you zaniest work experience?David StoneCheck out all my books on my Amazon Author Page

Continuing with Chapter Two of A Witch Next Door, a new novel I'm serializing after a comment by fellow Binghamton native and writer, Roger K. Smith (The Chenango Kid), I'm repeating my earlier caveat that this is a work in progress that may never be finished. If that's okay with you, please read on.

I Never Left Binghamton

I never left Binghamton. A tired, old, inaccurate cliche says, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” If you’re born a hick, you’re stuck with strains of bumpkin strumming banjos in your brain, that’s the circulated untruth. But you can leave it all behind if you tie up your loose ends. I never got to do that. Dangling threads and unknotted strings are all over the place. Such is my personal slice of the calamitous legacy Mom’s strike for freedom and better weather dropped over us like a sudden shower. Binghamton was a beautiful, successful small town in the Fifties, a middle class dream come true before the social configurations binding America got busted. Had New York under our loose-zippered governor, Nelson Rockefeller, not converted Harper College into Binghamton University during our fleeting national romance with education, the city nearby might be no more than a mouldering slag heap of depopulation by now, its reason for being left to idle in under financed libraries, detritus sifted through the cracks as industry fled. Hitched along in the boom the Erie Canal seeded all across upstate after DeWitt Clinton willed it into being, blowing off the experts, Binghamton got luckier than most. A pioneering shoe company built a community within the community, what was then called “a company town,” now something less than a punch line. Endicott-Johnson prospered from winning the right to supply footwear to America’s fighting men until the Cold War dried up the blood flow of wealth. Fifty years later, population scraped down to half, tanneries you once smelled from miles away demolished, Binghamton competes to be the least destroyed of cities progress and manifold national priorities failed to tug along. A middle finger casually raised to the working class can still be seen as it speeds away on the interstate. When a species finds its role in nature no longer necessary, say because it chewed up all its bounty, it fails and, if lucky enough to collapse in mud, vanishes into fossils, otherwise into barely visible traces inside a helix. Outside the fossil record, the species becomes what is known during down-to-earth debates as a fart in a windstorm. Gone. Something else fills the gap. In American cities, we decided to defy the natural order. We restocked the potholed streets and rusting infrastructure with or grasping poor and otherwise objectionable subcultures. The needy now fail from lack of nourishment around deteriorating skeletons. We scratch our heads, mystified over how that happened. Our voices rise passionately to fables of a vanishing middle class, but we seem just as addicted to maintaining impoverished cousins, rank and file placeholders, on which to bank our pride. Binghamton wasn’t a wreck when I grew up. It was a perfect American town, muscled by woking families. You could always find a job at Endicott-Johnson or IBM. Stretched out along the Brandywine Highway, Link Aviation was still too strong for hungry Wall Street predators. Innovative companies sunk roots in a valley scooped out by the Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers, joined at an oblique angle. We had our assimilated, Italians and Poles stocking neighborhoods. Blacks settled along Susquehanna Street and in public housing on the fringe of the South Side. At the center of the city, Chenango Street bends into Court as cars flow through downtown. The domed county courthouse rests behind a broad lawn stretching to the street. Shade trees lend it a relaxed country feeling. Look west and at the end of a commercial strip, a bridge carries traffic across the river, a feeder canal in busier times. Tony, Hector, I and some other West Side guys hung out in front of the serious columns of a bank building on the north side of Court. Shoppers filled the sidewalks on Monday and Thursday evenings, drawn to McCleans and Fowlers, anchor department stores, and satellite speciality shops between. We were sixteen, girl crazy and afloat with rock and roll. It was the summer of the Stones. Smoking cigarettes, we flirted with girls we didn’t know. The flavor of the world ahead came to us. Across the street, where Washington intersected, boys from North High, which was farther east than East Junior, and nowhere near the border with Port Dickinson and Sunrise Terrace, gathered to gossip. Our views were optimistic. The only downside we ever heard about was reserved for high school dropouts, of which I was not yet one. Kennedy had been assassinated, an impossible happening the government helped us pass off as extraordinary, an anomaly that could never happen again. A minor war heated up. We’d all sign up for draft cards, but college, then marriage would keep us out of the horror of the first war broadcast live. You didn’t have to go far. Cross any of the nearby bridges over the Susquehanna or Chenango or climb the viaduct above the Erie-Lackawanna depot, you walked a neighborhood in less than ten minutes. Attended gas stations hosted cars. Community churches and corner stores kept communities fed. Mothers networked. Kids found friends on quiet streets and playgrounds. Rudy Fox’s gang menaced, echoing the noise from New York City, one-hundred and fifty miles away, on the fringes. Bad guys and girls with reputations joined. The rest of us steered clear, our lives hooked into school routines, sports and weekend dances. Families, except for mine and an invisible sprinkling of others, were glued intact, nuclear and traditional. The middle class worked until the factories closed, and the avalanche of social decline began rolling downhill with the certainty of springtime floods along the rivers. If any of us saw what was coming, he kept his mouth shut. Tony and I, sixteen that summer, were emotionally preoccupied with trying to control our rambling girlfriends, dreading the end of summer and our earliest sexual dramas. Making out with me in Tony’s basement, Sandy finally stopped batting my hand away from her breast. “I figured if that’s all you wanted, fine,” she later told me. It was, and it was all I got before autumn came and she bumped me aside for a guy with a car. Storm clouds never dimmed the broader horizon. What was about to go wrong was not so brief or forgettable as a burst of thunder, lightning and drenching rain. It was in the ground, poisoning the roots. We couldn’t see it. Well, maybe some of us could if we wanted to, but we didn’t. Five years later, I packed my books and shoes and carried what little else I owned away from Binghamton, sent by my draft board to arctic exile in snowbound Buffalo. Any other hell was better than Southeast Asia. By then, the world had changed in ways both large and small. Tony was already dead, killed in a car wreck while racing home to see his family before shipping out to Vietnam. My generation gave up its young men in bulk as the Chamber of Commerce pushed to keep Vietnam, 10,000 miles away, from independence. Many died fighting a jungle war. More were lost in spirit and disillusion. Tens of thousands crippled. And nobody could tell us why in ways more appealing than a spooky domino theory that hardly justified losing a life. Guys went anyway, still trusting. Guys went out of patriotism. Guys went out of fear. The jungles seemed so far away, the condemnation so close. My best friend before Tony volunteered. Abandoned by his alcoholic family, Denny found a place to grow up in the home of a man who made it his cause to help teenage boys in trouble. Red gave him shelter on his small farm in the Windsor foothills. He’d inherited the place from his mother as well as responsibility for his sister who’d arrived on Earth without enough of a mind to get by on her own. Unmarried, Red played foster father to boys who were close to falling through the social cracks most Americans preferred not to know were there. Denny and I spent a summer riding two odd horses Red also rescued. One was a retired trotter, his steady pace a wonder to watch and a horror to ride; the other a muscular palomino. Because we were boys, we saddled up even the trotter and raced in a field claimed by ghosts at night. A trotter is no competition for a naturally running horse, but Denny exercised his rights of near ownership to assign ridership. He relented after I wobbled home with my first and, so far, only saddle sores. Red required us to feed the horses, clean out the stalls and to carry pails of fresh water up to the house. At night, when heat held like fog over the rolling hilltop, he let us haul sleeping bags out to the woods to rest under the cooling trees. There I found another first: ghosts. Or ghost, maybe. We couldn’t be sure of the number, but of the existence, there was no question. Stretched out on ground, bags zipped up, smoking cigarettes and looking up through the branches at tiny breaks of black sky and faint stars, Denny and I continued that long conversation boys had as we calculated the mechanics and manners of becoming men. I doubt this happens much anymore, now in the era of minutely managed childhoods, but we traded what we knew about girls, jobs and how the social strata worked itself out. We tried on guesses about what our lives might become. Both of us were more detached from our families than our friends were, our imaginations less confined by expectations. Somewhere in the middle of the night, as we drifted toward that indescribable zone where waking slides sideways into sleep, rocks began cutting through the leafy canopy, thudding and bouncing on ground cushioned by decades of crushed and decaying leaves. “Who the fuck’s out there throwing rocks?” Denny asked. The rocks seemed to be flying in from the open field where we raced earlier. One after another, they ripped through the branches overhead, sometimes bouncing off as gravity pulled them down. We speculated uselessly on what asshole would take the trouble to come out here in the dark to toss rocks into the trees, probably to bug us. But Denny had a stranger question. “Where is he getting all those stones?” Without interruption, they kept falling. Where would someone find stones in a wheat field in the dark? Growing up in the country, you get used to living with odd phenomena, dogs that bark at invisible intruders, lightning sparking out of a cloudless sky, creaking floorboards. You learn that it’s benign, not worth stopping whatever you’re doing. That was about to become our position on the rock thrower as sleep grew more enticing, but then, it began to rain. In the woods, you hear rain slapping leaves over your head minutes before the water finds its way to you. We listened, wondering if it might pass quickly and leave us dry. The splashing increased, the drops larger. “Ah, shit,” Denny said. “We better get back to the barn before we’re soaked.” It was too dark to roll up our bags, and we didn’t want to take the time anyway. We’d be spreading them across the barn floor near the horse stalls in just a few minutes. We weaved through the trees, nearly blind in the moonless dark. The woods stirred with spirits. You could feel them, beacons of energy around us like a million dim fireflies. Were they here to guide us or kick us out? The rocks hadn’t chased us away. So, now, had the spirits escalated? Rain filled the air, raising an indistinct chorus in the cottony dark as Denny and I walked out of the woods and onto the double-rutted trail used earlier to lead our horses. By the time we pulled the barn door open, laid out our bags and fell into nearly instant slumber, we were too lost with exhaustion to wonder aloud about what we’d seen. On a freshly washed morning, mist lifting off the trees across the pasture, we started over, never rolling out our sleeping bags in those woods again. Two years later, Denny was fighting in Vietnam. How much time had really passed? A letter arrived with a complicated, military return address, and I tore it open. Always the more swaggering of us, he boasted about his confirmed kills and how many were women and children, “at that.” Shapeless fear smoked up from fires rekindled in forgotten pits in the soils of cultures past. “I hear my sister is running around with niggers,” he added. “Let me know if you can find out. I’ll take care of that shit when I get home.” I used to save letters, but this one I didn’t. I threw it in the trash, and even knowing Denny was lost to the madness of war, I never tried to find him. A primitive wave washed up, and he was gone. An unreleasable connection lingers. One night, a year before, Denny fixed me up with his sister while he paired off with her friend. I liked Linda, and she liked me enough to let me struggle through a whole night with her, unable pull off the magic of inserting a nickel into a dime slot. Sixteen, I lacked a permanent home I was willing to live in for the first time. In the morning, after everyone else left, I was in the unfamiliar house alone. My life was just beginning in an awkward, mapless way. I couldn’t stay here. I needed to find a place to live and money to pay for it. The classifieds listed one thing I really wanted to do: stand up comedy. Paralyzing insecurity on stage and inexperience kept me from dialing the number. Walking along the Brandywine Highway toward Robinson Street, I disappeared into the stream of observation that made becoming a writer inevitable. A rawness of unfinished spring left grass descending from the shoulder an unsatisfying, dirty green, the gravelly surface hard-damp with lingering winter. One thing an outsider notices is that the world will never pause to let you come in or invite you to catch up. You have to force it, an act which means some part of you will always be other, out, because you came through the wrong door or no door. Finding the sidewalk, I headed down Robinson toward Chenango on a trail roughened with familiar, lost things. The difficult truth hadn’t landed with me yet that I was a skater, gliding through crowds without entangling. New sets were being assembled, others left behind without finish, me a human neutrino. I looked down Liberty Street, the worst place in the city. My short term friend Dominick lived on this falling apart street, the year we finished grade school. We bused from the country into the hard city every day, then. Dominick was gone, now. So was Jimmy. And Lynn, the first girl I fantasized about marrying when I was eleven years old, desperate to calculate normal and a place to belong. Robinson Street ends at another oblique angle with Chenango, a slanting artery in a square town. In the dark brick public school near the corner, I finally left the sixth grade, my report card filled with As and Bs diminished by the scolding I caught from my brothers, once protectors, now scowling judges. “You should get all As when you repeat a grade,” I heard. Dad looked at my report card. “I see you finally passed,” he said, joining the chorus. How could I ever leave them? How could I not? My brothers, my jailers. On into town, I walked past the sketchy neighborhoods in the mix with factories and railroads making up the interim space. A viaduct carried traffic over the Erie-Lackawanna tracks to Henry Street where everything changed, the Hotel Arlington filling the corner. Every time I walked down that viaduct, the hotel straight ahead, a memory floated up of Ronnie Spector’s voice embedded in Phil’s wall of sound, Be My Baby singing in my head, downstream toward my first evanescent crush. The Arlington hosted teen dances then, scrambling for alternative sources of revenue. The station across the street got fewer trains as Binghamton’s economic erosion muddied the fertile medium of business travel, all that transparent to us as we walked through the upholstered lobby to the ballroom. All we cared about was the music, the dance and emotions swelling the space. I see myself in a wiggle-wobble line that night, teaching redheaded Leslie how to shuffle her feet, positioning them for a small, sweeping jump before dancing back. Wiggle-wobble lines disappeared before my memories of that night and Leslie did. For once, my brothers were proud of me. “He goes right to the top, dancing with a girl who’s already graduated,” one joked. Maybe Leslie didn’t know she had two years on me, but it couldn’t be a secret for long. What was I going to do? Date her? With no money, no car and not old enough to get a license to drive it if I did, I settled for a confidence builder. My next dance was months away, and Leslie, I found out, was Jewish, a line not yet ready to be crossed. After the Hotel Arlington, the street up to Court is filled with markers, none yet set. The future was as blank as it could be. Skater, rambler, I’d treat my Dad to lunch at the Little Venice, the last private time we had together, before driving across town to Philadelphia Sales on Clinton Street, the bargains shoppers’ paradise where he took us at the end of summer to get outfits before school started. Ahead was the Greyhound terminal where I popped out on a summer day and saw Joyce with her friend Hobbs on the corner, coincidence beyond calculation. The dirt parking lot where a building had been raised, The Queen E diner, the county courthouse with its expansive lawn like a pool forcing the roads to pass… You figure out later that there’s a partial transfer of ownership. Buildings and street corners, dives over on Washington where you ate cheap hamburgers bulked up with oatmeal, small alleys where you kissed girls in the dark, the riverbank beneath the bridge where you hid to drink beer alone and watch the water flow, the courthouse lawn, the hard-edged parking ramp, Tricia Nixon telling us we were misinformed about her daddy in 1968, the department stores, the Endicott-Johnson corner shop where you sold shoes — these places own some of you, even when they’re gone or changed. You invested. Taking off on Bell’s Theorem, nonlocality, interpreted by some as proving that, once connected, the smallest particles remain intimately entwined forever, even drifting billions of miles apart, unable to act without an instant, equivalent forced on the other, dreamers now suggest it works the same way in the macro universe as it does in the micro. As below, so it is above. The seething uncertainty of the quantum sea never lets us dry out on the beach… Maybe. But when I go back, the ghosts fade. E-Js is now a Chinese takeout, Thom McAn’s across the street a nondescript, legacy men’s shop. The passions I felt at seventeen are scarcely traceable. I try but don’t care anymore what became of the other players in that drama. Pushed aside, the past decays. The tug of reminiscence is not enough. It all goes. Some stays though, compressed. Bell’s Theorem isn’t complete for people. As we trail off across the endless, thinning universe, contact lessons, response withers. We all go away. Our universes go with us.

﻿What If You Died Right Now and Went To...?﻿"Tethered with an unbroken thread rooted in timeless space, our souls merge with into physical selves to complete a human being. Traditional belief in a unity in which mind, body and soul that can be separated confirms intuition. Whatever we decide rationally, conceiving the end of our selves demands a leap beyond most imaginations. That makes it tempting to think of eternal souls as (that dreadful cliche) 'who we really are,' but it’s also misleading."

- from Illusions of Life and Death, What If You Died Right Now and Went To...?

The blithe New Age dismissal of death and with it, by consequence, life bothered me every time I thought about it. I wasn't as objective as I wanted to be. After all, it was just an idea, wasn't it? But it got under my skin.

I grew to realize that it bothered me for some of the same reasons that cults, religious and otherwise, did. Nobody's forced to join them, so who cares what fantasies bind them to their groups? That's how most people would let it pass, but it occurred to me that the beliefs were masked escape hatches that let followers evade responsibility.

Our communities need more adults, don't they? The more trickling off into evasions, the harder it becomes for the rest of us to hold things together.

But the emerging beliefs about death and life seemed more potent, more dangerous because they were bing promoted as "cutting edge," as whole new ideas on the theme of life and death.

To me, they just seemed like a paint job, a rehash of the same old story, told with less earthbound bluntness, wafted with an airy disregard to objective consideration.

My concerns got me started at writing What If You Died and Went To...? But I was surprised that, getting into it, I was writing a kind of spiritual autobiography, feeling around for how I got to where I was, believing that life - the one where you get your picture ID on your driver's license - that life is the core experience of them all, not the one you spent before, will launch later or the one where you linger, refreshing and learning, between.

New Novel, Chapter One

Note: after being challenged by a comment by fellow Binghamton native, novelist Roger K. Miller (The Chenango Kid), I decided to post chapters of my new novel as blogs - with a word of caution: not all novels get finished. Many of mine have died on the vine without ripening. If that's okay with you, lets get going with Chapter One from "A Witch Next Door."

A white church with a dirt and gravel parking area filled the corner. Seldom used, a road wandered up into wooded hills toward the county airport. Next to the church was a darker house, shades always drawn. A witch lived there, according to my three older brothers. Next came our house and, then, a less chaotic place where my best friend lived. Our house was too small to corral five children under eight, two adults, just four rooms with Dad’s car parked in a driveway separating ours from the necromancer’s place. Getting out must have enticed Mom already. For someone else, getting out might mean the disgraceful, hidden crime, a wrist sliced open to an unsolvable puzzle. Mom went the other way. Suicide crosses everyone’s mind. In hers, it was probably something like a rag blowing across a busy street on a stormy day, here and gone, dispatched before the skies cleared. Dad moved us all out before anything drastic happened, moved to a much bigger place. My brother and I still slept together on a cot in a bedroom without closets, our other bothers in a bunkbed and our sister in a room by herself. Mom and Dad slept in an alleged master bedroom downstairs, off the kitchen. Seven of us shared one, small bathroom. Raised on a farm with ten brothers and sisters and only an outhouse and a manual pump for water, Dad probably believed this was a step up. Mom, I’m guessing, twenty-five and in charge of five children under ten, felt like she was walking around in a mutable straitjacket. But if that was true, I recall no evidence of it. Mom drove us around in Dad’s car when she could get her hands on it, dispensing lessons about double and triple parking and coasting downhill by releasing the gears for a free ride. She sang How Much is that Doggy in the Window and Que Sera Sera with her hands on the wheel. Once, on a Sunday outing, she badly sprained her ankle when her high heel got stuck between the slats on the merry-go-round in a play area at the Ross Park Zoo. Saturday morning, our next door neighbor dedicated country and western songs to us on his radio show. Mom loved it. He was probably flirting with her. That Sunday when she injured her ankle at the zoo, we saw his band play live. I remember Les telling all of us who’d gathered on folding chairs that he was about to “wind Ronnie up,” introducing his guitarist son for a solo. Les later became notorious for dying in his girlfriend’s bed, a heart attack taking him while his tractor trailer rig idled along Upper Court Street below her house. He shares the historical distinction of dying in the saddle with Nelson Rockefeller, proving that death disregards riches. A decade later, Les’s girlfriend became my father’s. Rumors of a marriage circulated without closure. Decades after that, Les’s widow became my stepmother, long after it might’ve been useful for my brothers, sister and I to have one. Such were, as I understand them, the foundations of country and western music. Granted more idle time in the transition from farming to a more urban culture, we let our morals soften in the pursuit of happiness. Christian regulation went into decline as soap operas soaked up housewives’ afternoons. In the Fifties, America was falling apart. Later, experts were shocked and the public dismayed over escalating divorce rates and broken families. I wasn’t. I confess to a kind of smug satisfaction. Glass walls were suddenly everywhere, other families just as fucked up as mine. They kept their robes on longer, but their bodies were just like ours. Culture ruptured. We kept up a damn good front for a long time. The prevailing mystery of my life centers on the question of how my parents managed to take credit for five children. This is like Pluto and Mars finding a way to pair up in orbit and birth a mini, sunless solar system of their own. Inconceivable, yet conceived. “Your father swept me off my feet,” Mom told me, warming convincingly with the memory. That would have been easier to believe if I’d never met Dad. No knock on Dad. I’d just never seen any evidence that he was a sweep me off my feet kind of guy or that he had the weapons for smooth seduction tucked away in his arsenal. That we knew of, he had exactly two romances in the thirty years between Mom’s leaving and his dying far too young. The one we knew about only from gossip. The other was visible, but cryptic. I use “visible” loosely. I found out about this romance when, wandering home after midnight on a Saturday, I collided with rearranged furniture in our lightless living room. In the morning, I figured out that Dad had rigged a pair of chairs face to face to create a makeshift bed where his date slept while he dozed in the alleged master bedroom. I was sixteen, and my knowing hormones alerted me to the issues. What eventually dismayed us about his affair with Dorothy was the way in which her son, who threatened to become our stepbrother, got privileges denied us. A case of Coke, for example, was parked in a utility room near the kitchen. Any soft drinks we ever got were bought out of our allowances, calories, empty or otherwise, a no nonsense matter in our home, previously. I began having Coke for breakfast that summer, slipshod rebel that I was. Add to that the fact that Dorothy’s son, Chuckie — yes, Chuckie — was pudgy and uninteresting, softened by divorce into a momma’s boy. My brothers weren’t always the greatest guys, but they were always, at a minimum, interesting. It was a family trait. In concert with my brothers and sister, I was happy that Dad finally had the companionship everyone craves, and like them, I was amused by his efforts at subterfuge, sneaking her in and out of his bedroom like he lived in a restricted boarding house. It was funny that Dorothy captured Dad by flirting him up from her post at the cash register in the supermarket. It was nice to see how she bolstered his confidence and how he warmed up in her company. But I didn’t like her. At first, I did, but then, we got to know each other. A year after he recorded it on an album, Nat King Cole’s Lazy, Hazy Days of Summer was becoming a seasonal classic. It came on the radio one day when I happened to be in the kitchen with Dorothy. “I remember how much I used to love Nat King Cole when he first started out,” she reminisced. “What a voice! Then, I got to see his picture, and holy cow, he was a nigger. I never liked to listen to him again.” Nor I to her. Racism was casual and usually undisguised in the Fifties and early Sixties, but the awakening of the Sixties rendered it bitter and disgusting for some of us. It was sad when Dorothy and Dad broke up. Not because of her racism — Dad was a racist too — but because Dad ran out of patience with her pampered son. She walked after a dollop of criticism landed on her face. She chose to walk several miles home, and he didn’t go after her. His polar ice shelf returned. The only hint of romance I saw from him in all the years that followed was a forgettable incident when he was what we then called tipsy, a light, playful inebriation, and flirted with my cousin. It was harmless but a side of him he usually kept behind his shield. True, when they were both in their sixties, Dad married Les’s widow. There must have been some romance, although she complained that she’d married for companionship and had been disappointed while wrestling with Dad’s taciturn nature. The man could put up a wall like none other. He was sullen, just astonishingly unmovable and inaccessible when he felt like it. That marriage ended in classic catastrophe. Dad returned home from work one afternoon and found Juanita gone, which was probably okay with him by then, but somehow, she’d managed to drag every stick of furniture out the door with her. That’s not what you find in the track record of a sweep me off my feet guy. Mom was a fabulist, though, her reported history Swiss cheesed with missing pieces, otherwise frequently in dispute or subject to change. You could count on the gist of who she was, but you wouldn’t want to gamble on the facts. The last time I saw Mom, my brother, his wife and daughter invited my sister and I to travel with them to California to see her. She was in her seventies, then, the ruins of a once great beauty as undeniable as the lingering relics of Rome. She laughed easily still, recounting details from decades old memories while less precise with the recent past. She was also weakened by internecine battles, many of her own instigation, that racked her second family on the Left Coast. The melodramas and intrigues are hardly worth getting into, and who had enough time to jot down those nickel stories for the archive anyway? But after an afternoon spent with our half-sisters and their families, during which Mom became so rattled she forgot her diabetes medication, we drove her, still shaky, to her house where we got to meet our youngest half-brother because he was slow to escape. Just for the record, two half-brothers and one half-sister were no longer in the family circle, outside the Mom loop voluntarily. The youngest, who still lived with Mom as an adult and was rumored to manufacture illegal drugs in his bedroom, was scrambling toward a car in the driveway with his girlfriend when we pulled into the driveway. “There’s my baby,” Mom exclaimed. “You can meet him after all.” During our earlier visit, around lunchtime, she’d been unable to awaken him in his bedroom/lab. He seemed nervous, eager to be gone, shuffling steadily toward the getaway car. We later guessed that one of his sisters called ahead to say the East Coast crew was approaching and he needed to get out before his personal wreckage became visible. It’s strange what people will do to maintain appearances when no one else gives a shit. Shaking my youngest, little known brother’s sweaty palm, I did nothing to discourage his departure. A get acquainted chat seemed unlikely. He got in and his girlfriend backed her car out. Then, Mom and I stood alone in her driveway. No one else had gotten out of our car. She was like a saturated sponge beginning to feel squeezed. “Listen,” I told her, “it isn’t between you and them. It’s between you and Him.” I pointed upward. Okay, so I stole that from Wayne Dyer. It was my one chance to give my mother advice, and it was sincere, if plagiarized. That did “so much good,” she later wrote, but within a year, she took offense at something she thought I said to one of my feuding half-sisters and banished me. I never saw or spoke to her again. When she died, my wife and I were visiting a friend in Vienna, and I heard about it only from a slew of messages left on my phone in New York. I was too late, even for the funeral. I wish I could say I felt some profound sadness at her passing, but that would be a lie. I just took it in stride. Mom abandoned us long before, my wounds healed over. It might even have been a wise move on her part, but some broken things can’t be put back together because the pieces change over time. What fit once now can’t. The only lingering question in my mind is, when did she effectively abandon me? Was it when she left town and started another family with her lover or was it earlier, much earlier? “When I saw you were another boy, I wanted to put you back,” is how Mom detailed the miracle of my birth. Fourth boy to spring from her into this crazy world, I was not the girl she wanted. She joked about it. She had to put a smiley face on it, really. Women then never admitted resenting the burden of motherhood. My oldest brother had barely turned four when my parents had to find a way to jam me into their crowded home, my youngest brother not yet two. Who could blame her at twenty-one, vivacious, in love with the world and anchored by four weights? An orphan before she married Dad, we were her only intimate family. And here she was, stuck with one more boy. Me.

Mom and Dad kept tensions sufficiently under control to survive under the same roof for six more years. The daughter Mom wanted arrived less than two years after me. Given that, it’s surprising how little I remember. One early spring day, an unfamiliar car sat halfway down our driveway when our school bus approached. My brothers and I ran down the steps the instant the driver stopped, then paused to inspect the car. In its trunk was a huge corrugated box stuffed full of our clothes. Memories began accumulating at that moment, when I was six and a half. Before, there’s a lot of empty space. It’s odd, but should I worry about that or the historical vacuums to come? The story as it’s now told is that we form consistent memories after roughly three and a half. Earlier, something called childhood amnesia is explained by the fact that our language skills are so undeveloped that we can’t shape what happens into something our brains can add to the library. After that, laying things down as stories gets right to it. We never consciously remember everything at any age, but it’s strange to me that I vividly remember the witch from when I was around three and a half, actually a couple of months less, and another event that’s remarkable because it’s my only memory of my father before he got rid of Mom and took custody. What I wonder about is the missing memories. The Halloween when my brothers scared me with the witch next door is firm but hazy. I don’t even remember my brothers individually, not as characters separate from myself, for years, but what I remember doesn’t scare me. It reminds me how much I loved belonging to them, even as their younger incompetent. I know this because my next memory of them is from nearly a year later when we’ve moved to our new house. I don’t see them but feel the intense sadness when they climb on the school bus without me in September. I remember crying so hard on the edge of our rough lawn at the side of the road, Mom had to come out and get me. After that, not much at all until we’re playing Little League baseball, each of us on different teams. The other thing I remember from three and a half comes with two markers. I remember the thrill of childhood play. The girl next door, who must have been my age, is running through her house with me. We’re chasing each other, no goals, just the wild enthusiastic release of energies that now drive parents into panic. Out of control. I remember being warned by her father to be careful and that, not much later, one of us bumped a plate on a shelf and smashed it into a million pieces. What sticks this to the bulletin board in my head is that I then got spanked by her father, although I don’t remember that, just the aftermath. The rest of the adhesive is stirred by my running home and telling my father that our neighbor spanked me. Over a backyard fence, the men met face to face, and when told about my offense, Dad backed off as Mom stood by. They agreed that I had the spanking coming. The power of what I learned that day clarifies when I dig around and find that I haven’t a shred of memory of my father after that until I was six years old, nothing, not a spanking, not a word of advice, not a friendly smile, nothing until he took us out to the zoo on visiting day after he and Mom separated. By then, I was mostly afraid of him and his flairs of violent anger. I take what little clay I have to work with and what I make of it is that I became so attached to my brothers to fill a gap left by my parents. That gap eventually led to my risky and rewarding independence. Independence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, though, because it brings along an uncanny gift for shredding attachments and a deficit in understanding pains inflicted on others. Rebels leave bootprints. Somewhere, there is a cave and deep down beyond where the bears slept and artists recorded pictures on the walls are missing years from my childhood. Hypnotherapy might pump them up to the surface in a kind of malformed froth, but I’m not sure I want to invest in sorting all that out. Memory retreats for a reason, and if it’s insight I want, the memories I kept are already pregnant with messages I can use.

The used car in our driveway with all our clothes in it? Mom’s funky variation on a moving van. Mom was never burdened by careful contemplation. She was more of a dreamer, an expressionist in a painterly world of neo-realists. She and her boyfriend cooked up a plan to leave the sometimes cold Northeast for sunny Florida, a land not yet set aside as a vast retirement village. Shock is a memory eraser. After spotting that car, parked halfway down so that its door met the steps from our front porch, I vaguely recall standing by during a wedding that night. The next connected the thread begins running when our car breaks down in Georgia. Bob, Mom’s boyfriend, is not with us. He’s drove ahead in another car with a man I assume was the recent groom. Mom has sardined us in with the bride in the loaded sedan from the driveway. I remember the thrilling red clay of Georgia and being taken in by a couple from a nearby home when our car broke down, invited to stay overnight in their log house, polished wood everywhere. What I don’t remember is getting the car fixed or arriving in Florida. I don’t remember anyone else from our certainly traumatized crew, my brothers, my sister or even Mom until we’re all stuck in a terrible boarding house in Miami and my close call with death imprinted a turning point.